I'm bitter-sweet about recent Opera (both browser and company strategy) - I've been using Opera for 8 years. I'm really happy to see some developments, because Opera browser always seemed somehow stalled (except for investing resources in strange technologies - e.g. widgets, unite).

I'm afraid that Opera vision is becoming a company serving ads, so the browser will be no longer best choice for power users.

The old Opera (till 12.16) just didn't have many users, but with new engine Opera could take some users from Chrome. I think this is a step for being attractive for advertisers.

Just take a look at Opera business page [1] - the "technology" part just gives historical context, whereas ads/content takes prominient place.

I think we'll see some innovations from Opera such as mentioned Stash, Discover (another way of promoting partners' content), etc. But I think in the case of web browser we really need faster horse.

What is interesting, Opera published their commits to Chromium and Blink [2] - it seams that only 8 Opera developers work with browser, at least with adopting engine.

By the way, Opera 12.16 was released, but you will not find it easily[3].

[1]:http://business.opera.com/company

[2]:http://operasoftware.github.io/upstreamtools/

[2]:windows: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S... http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/1216/int/Opera_1216_int_S...

mac: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/mac/1216/Opera_12.16-1860.x86...

linux: http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/1216/